Question

I’m not sure how to even research this question so maybe some awesome rails developer can point me in the right direction.

I have a model that’s holding a question and correct answer. On the show view, I want the user to enter their answer into an input field and upon pressing submit, their answer is compared to the one held in the model. I don’t need to save their answer.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

You could use a non ActiveRecord model for that. Something like this:

class UserAnswer # note that this class doesn't inherit from ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessor :question_id, :answer

  def initialize(params)
    @question_id = params[:question_id]
    @answer = params[:answer]
  end

  def correct?
    q = QuestionAnswerModel.find(self.question_id)
    q.answer == self.answer
  end
end

Then in your controller you can do something like this:

user_answer = UserAnswer.new(params) # params contains :question_id and :answer
user_answer.correct? # returns true or false